The Interview

One of the aspects of journalism that has always fascinated me is the interview. I admire good reporters that can get information out of people that they might not want to give out. I enjoy the cat and mouse game that is played during an investigative interview. I also enjoy relaxed interviews and find weird shows like “the true Hollywood story” where they completely remove the interviewer’s questions.

I have been watching morning television for a while. I used to watch the Spanish channel’s morning show for years. I would get my weather online the night before so there was no need for local news. Weather here in KC changes so quickly that a look at what the day might bring before I leave out the door is actually useful. So I started watching the morning show which injects local weather right into their broadcast.

It has been an interesting experience because of their interviews. Celebrities peddling their latest project look like they are still sleeping. They are in a daze so deep sometimes that they are only somewhat aware that they are on TV.

Those are not the ones that entertain me the most. The celebrities are used to being interviewed so they enter an almost robotic state where they spew out canned answers probably crafted by some publicist. Regular people are the ones that just seem to be caught off guard when the camera begins to roll and their tongue gets all tangled.

Once in a while the interviewer can snap them out, but most of the time it becomes a monosyllables game. The interviewer trows the slowest ball about the subject or situation and anyone with a functioning brain can hit it out of the park, however the trance is not broken so they go to phase two. I call phase two when the interviewer actually spells out the answer for the person in order to get them talking again. This attempt I think fails the most and people just sit there looking at the camera like it hypnotized them completely.

I can almost hear the director in the background saying something like “we got a sleeper.” or maybe a producer saying “I swear I prepped them, I swear they were talking before.” Overall is just simply amusing to me, but it makes me appreciate the work that the interviewer does that much more.

3 comments on “The Interview”

You might like the movie, Frost/Nixon, then b/c it’s about the reporter that got Nixon to admit that he’d done something wrong. It was directed by Ron Howard — we enjoyed it far more than we expected to b/c I think he did a great job of also showing the behind the scenes strategy with the reporter and how he was planning to try to get Nixon to admit it.